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Drive
Drive
Drive
CHAPTER 5
Mastery
You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,
you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon
making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,
wear the same rapt expression, forgetting
themselves in a function.
How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.
W. H. Auden
O
ne summer morning in 1944, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, age ten, stood on a train platform in
Budapest, Hungary, with his mother, two brothers, and about seventy relatives who'd come
to see them off. World War II was raging, and Hungary, an ambivalent member of the Axis,
was being squeezed from every political and geographic corner. Nazi soldiers were
occupying the country in retaliation for Hungary's secret peace negotiations with the
United States and Great Britain. Meanwhile, Soviet troops were advancing on the capital
city.
It was time to leave. So the foursome boarded a train for Venice, Italy, where
Csikszentmihalyi's father, a diplomat, was working. As the train rumbled southwest, bombs
exploded in the distance. Bullets ripped through the train's windows, while a rifle-toting
soldier on board fired back at the attackers. The ten-year-old crouched under his seat,
terrified but also a little annoyed.
It struck me at that point that grown-ups had really no idea how to live, Csikszentmihalyi
told me some sixty-five years later.
His train would turn out to be the last to cross the Danube River for many years. Shortly
after its departure, air strikes destroyed Hungary's major bridges. The Csikszentmihalyis
were well educated and well connected, but the war flattened their lives. Of the relatives
on the train platform that morning, more than half would be dead five months later. One of
Csikszentmihalyi's brothers spent six years doing hard labor in the Ural Mountains.
Another was killed fighting the Soviets.
The whole experience got me thinking, Csikszentmihalyi said, recalling his ten-year-old
self. There has got to be a better way to live than this.
FROM COMPLIANCE TO ENGAGEMENT
T
he opposite of autonomy is control. And since they sit at different poles of the
behavioral compass, they point us toward different destinations. Control leads to
compliance; autonomy leads to engagement. And this distinction leads to the second element
of Type I behavior: mastery the desire to get better and better at something that matters.
As I explained in Part One, Motivation 2.0's goal was to encourage people to do particular
things in particular ways that is, to get them to comply. And for that objective, few
motivators are more effective than a nice bunch of carrots and the threat of an occasional
stick. This was rarely a promising route to self-actualization, of course. But as an
economic strategy, it had a certain logic. For routine tasks, the sort of work that
defined most of the twentieth century, gaining compliance usually worked just fine.
But that was then. For the definitional tasks of the twenty-first century, such a strategy
falls short, often woefully short. Solving complex problems requires an inquiring mind and
the willingness to experiment one's way to a fresh solution. Where Motivation 2.0 sought
compliance, Motivation 3.0 seeks engagement. Only engagement can produce mastery. And the
pursuit of mastery, an important but often dormant part of our third drive, has become
essential in making one's way in today's economy.
Unfortunately, despite sweet-smelling words like empowerment that waft through corporate
corridors, the modern workplace's most notable feature may be its lack of engagement and
its disregard for mastery. Gallup's extensive research on the subject shows that in the
United States, more than 50 percent of employees are not engaged at work and nearly 20
percent are actively disengaged. The cost of all this disengagement: about $300 billion a
year in lost productivity a sum larger than the GDP of Portugal, Singapore, or Israel. Yet
in comparative terms, the United States looks like a veritable haven of Type I behavior at
work. According to the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., in some countries as little as 2 to
3 percent of the workforce is highly engaged in their work.
Equally important, engagement as a route to mastery is a powerful force in our personal
lives. While complying can be an effective strategy for physical survival, it's a lousy
one for personal fulfillment. Living a satisfying life requires more than simply meeting
the demands of those in control. Yet in our offices and our classrooms we have way too
much compliance and way too little engagement. The former might get you through the day,
but only the latter will get you through the night. And that brings us back to
Csikszentmihalyi's story.
In his early teens, after witnessing the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the Soviet
takeover of his country, Csikszentmihalyi was understandably weary of compliance and
looking for engagement. But he wouldn't find it at school. He dropped out of high school
at thirteen. For nearly a decade, he worked in various Western European countries at a
series of jobs, some odder than others, to support himself. And hoping to answer his
youthful question about a better way to live, he read everything he could get his hands on
in religion and philosophy. What he learned didn't satisfy him. It wasn't until he
inadvertently stumbled into a lecture by none other than Carl Jung that he heard about the
field of psychology and decided that it might hold the secrets he sought.
So in 1956, at the age of twenty-two, Csikszentmihalyi set off for the United States to
study psychology. He arrived in Chicago, a high school dropout with $1.25 in his pocket
whose only familiarity with the English language came from reading
Pogo
comic strips. Hungarian contacts in Chicago helped him find a job and a place to live.
His knowledge of Latin, German, and
Pogo
helped him pass the Illinois high school equivalency test in a language he neither spoke
nor read. He enrolled in the University of Illinois-Chicago, took classes during the day,
worked as a hotel auditor at night, and eventually wound up at the University of Chicago
psychology department, where just nine years after setting foot in America he earned a
Ph.D.
But Csikszentmihalyi resisted rafting down the main currents of his field. As he told me
one spring morning not long ago, he wanted to explore the positive, innovative, creative
approach to life instead of the remedial, pathological view that Sigmund Freud had or the
mechanistic work of B. F. Skinner and others who reduced behavior to simple stimulus and
response. He began by writing about creativity. Creativity took him into the study of
play. And his exploration of play unlocked an insight about the human experience that
would make him famous.
In the midst of play, many people enjoyed what Csikszentmihalyi called autotelic
experiences from the Greek
auto
(self ) and
telos
(goal or purpose). In an autotelic experience, the goal is self-fulfilling; the activity
is its own reward. Painters he observed during his Ph.D. research, Csikszentmihalyi said,
were so enthralled in what they were doing that they seemed to be in a trance. For them,
time passed quickly and self-consciousness dissolved. He sought out other people who
gravitated to these sorts of pursuits rock climbers, soccer players, swimmers,
spelunkers and interviewed them to discover what made an activity autotelic. It was
frustrating. When people try to recall how it felt to climb a mountain or play a great
musical piece, Csikszentmihalyi later wrote, their stories are usually quite stereotyped
and uninsightful. He needed a way to probe people's experiences in the moment. And in the
mid-1970s, a bold new technology one that any twelve-year-old now would find laughingly
retrograde came to the rescue: the electronic pager.
Csikszentmihalyi, who by then was teaching at the University of Chicago and running his
own psychology lab, clipped on a pager and asked his graduate students to beep him
randomly several times each day. Whenever the pager sounded, he recorded what he was doing
and how he was feeling. It was so much fun, he recalled in his office at the Claremont
Graduate University in southern California, where he now teaches. You got such a detailed
picture of how people lived. On the basis of this test run, he developed a methodology
called the Experience Sampling Method. Csikszentmihalyi would page people eight times a
day at random intervals and ask them to write in a booklet their answers to several short
questions about what they were doing, who they were with, and how they'd describe their
state of mind. Put the findings together for seven days and you had a flip book, a
mini-movie, of someone's week. Assemble the individual findings and you had an entire
library of human experiences.
Throughout my athletics career, the overall goal was always to be a better athlete than
I was at that moment whether next week, next month or next year. The improvement was the
goal. The medal was simply the ultimate reward for achieving that goal.
SEBASTIAN COEMiddle-distance runnerand two-time Olympicgold medal winner
From these results, Csikszentmihalyi began to peel back the layers of those autotelic
experiences. Perhaps equally significant, he replaced that wonky Greek-derived adjective
with a word he found people using to describe these optimal moments: flow. The highest,
most satisfying experiences in people's lives were when they were in flow. And this
previously unacknowledged mental state, which seemed so inscrutable and transcendent, was
actually fairly easy to unpack. In flow, goals are clear. You have to reach the top of the
mountain, hit the ball across the net, or mold the clay just right. Feedback is immediate.
The mountaintop gets closer or farther, the ball sails in or out of bounds, the pot you're
throwing comes out smooth or uneven.
Most important, in flow, the relationship between what a person had to do and what he
could do was perfect. The challenge wasn't too easy. Nor was it too difficult. It was a
notch or two beyond his current abilities, which stretched the body and mind in a way that
made the effort itself the most delicious reward. That balance produced a degree of focus
and satisfaction that easily surpassed other, more quotidian, experiences. In flow, people
lived so deeply in the moment, and felt so utterly in control, that their sense of time,
place, and even self melted away. They were autonomous, of course. But more than that,
they were engaged. They were, as the poet W. H. Auden wrote, forgetting themselves in a
function.
Maybe this state of mind was what that ten-year-old boy was seeking as that train rolled
through Europe. Maybe reaching flow, not for a single moment but as an ethic for
living maintaining that beautiful eye-on-the-object look to achieve mastery as a cook, a
surgeon, or a clerk was the answer. Maybe this was the way to live.
GOLDILOCKS ON A CARGO SHIP
Several years ago he can't recall exactly when Csikszentmihalyi was invited to Davos,
Switzerland, by Klaus Schwab, who runs an annual conclave of the global power elite in
that city. Joining him on the trip were three other University of Chicago faculty
members Gary Becker, George Stigler, and Milton Friedman all of them economists, all of
them winners of the Nobel Prize. The five men gathered for dinner one night and at the end
of the meal, Schwab asked the academics what they considered the most important issue in
modern economics.
The desire to do something because you find it deeply satisfying and personally
challenging inspires the highest levels of creativity, whether it's in the arts, sciences,
or business.
TERESA AMABILEProfessor, Harvard University
To my incredulous surprise, Csikszentmihalyi recounted, Becker, Stigler, and Friedman all
ended up saying a variation of ÔThere's something missing,' that for all its explanatory
power, economics still failed to offer a rich enough account of behavior, even in business
settings.
Csikszentmihalyi smiled and complimented his colleagues on their perspicacity. The concept
of flow, which he introduced in the mid-1970s, was not an immediate game-changer. It
gained some traction in 1990 when Csikszentmihalyi wrote his first book on the topic for a
wide audience and gained a small band of followers in the business world. However, putting
this notion into place in the real operations of real organizations has been slower going.
After all, Motivation 2.0 has little room for a concept like flow. The Type X operating
system doesn't oppose people taking on optimal challenges on the job, but it suggests that
such moments are happy accidents rather than necessary conditions for people to do great
work.
But ever so slowly the ground might be shifting. As the data on worker disengagement
earlier in the chapter reveal, the costs in both human satisfaction and organizational
health are high when a workplace is a no-flow zone. That's why a few enterprises are
trying to do things differently. As
Fast Company
magazine has noted, a number of companies, including Microsoft, Patagonia, and Toyota,
have realized that creating flow-friendly environments that help people move toward
mastery can increase productivity and satisfaction at work.
For example, Stefan Falk, a vice president at Ericsson, the Swedish telecommunications
concern, used the principles of flow to smooth a merger of the company's business units.
He persuaded managers to configure work assignments so that employees had clear objectives
and a way to get quick feedback. And instead of meeting with their charges for once-a-year
performance reviews, managers sat down with employees one-on-one six times a year, often
for as long as ninety minutes, to discuss their level of engagement and path toward
mastery. The flow-centered strategy worked well enough that Ericsson began using it in
offices around the world. After that, Falk moved to Green Cargo, an enormous logistics and
shipping company in Sweden. There, he developed a method of training managers in how flow
worked. Then he required them to meet with staff once a month to get a sense of whether
people were overwhelmed or underwhelmed with their work and to adjust assignments to help
them find flow. After two years of managerial revamping, state-owned Green Cargo became
profitable for the first time in 125 years and executives cite its newfound flowcentricity
as a key reason.
In addition, a study of 11,000 industrial scientists and engineers working at companies in
the United States found that the desire for intellectual challenge that is, the urge to
master something new and engaging was the best predictor of productivity. Scientists
motivated by this intrinsic desire filed significantly more patents than those whose main
motivation was money, even controlling for the amount of effort each group expended. (That
is, the extrinsically motivated group worked as long and as hard as their more Type I
colleagues. They just accomplished less perhaps because they spent less of their work time
in flow.)
And then there's Jenova Chen, a young game designer who, in 2006, wrote his MFA thesis on
Csikszentmihalyi's theory. Chen believed that video games held the promise to deliver
quintessential flow experiences, but that too many games required an almost obsessive
level of commitment. Why not, he thought, design a game to bring the flow sensation to
more casual gamers? Using his thesis project as his laboratory, Chen created a game in
which players use a computer mouse to guide an on-screen amoeba-like organism through a
surreal ocean landscape as it gobblies other creatures and slowly evolves into a higher
form. While most games require players to proceed through a fixed and predetermined series
of skill levels, Chen's allows them to advance and explore any way they desire. And unlike
games in which failure ends the session, in Chen's game failure merely pushes the player
to a level better matched to her ability. Chen calls his game flOw. And it's been a huge
hit. People have played the free online version of the game more than three million times.
(You can find it at ). The paid version, designed for the PlayStation game console, has
generated more than 350,000 downloads and collected a shelf full of awards. Chen used the
game to launch his own firm, thatgamecompany, built around both flow and flOw, that
quickly won a three-game development deal from Sony, something almost unheard of for an
unknown start-up run by a couple of twenty-six-year-old California game designers.
Green Cargo, thatgamecompany, and the companies employing the patent-cranking scientists
typically use two tactics that their less savvy competitors do not. First, they provide
employees with what I call Goldilocks tasks challenges that are not too hot and not too
cold, neither overly difficult nor overly simple. One source of frustration in the
workplace is the frequent mismatch between what people
must
do and what people
can
do. When what they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what
they must do falls short of their capabilities, the result is boredom. (Indeed,
Csikszentmihalyi titled his first book on autotelic experiences
Beyond Boredom and Anxiety
.) But when the match is just right, the results can be glorious. This is the essence of
flow. Goldilocks tasks offer us the powerful experience of inhabiting the zone, of living
on the knife's edge between order and disorder, of as painter Fritz Scholder once
described it walking the tightrope between accident and discipline.
The second tactic that smart organizations use to increase their flow-friendliness and
their employees' opportunities for mastery is to trigger the positive side of the Sawyer
Effect. Recall from Chapter 2 that extrinsic rewards can turn play into work. But it's
also possible to run the current in the other direction and turn work into play. Some
tasks at work don't automatically provide surges of flow, yet still need to get done. So
the shrewdest enterprises afford employees the freedom to sculpt their jobs in ways that
bring a little bit of flow to otherwise mundane duties. Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton,
two business school professors, have studied this phenomenon among hospital cleaners,
nurses, and hairdressers. They found, for instance, that some members of the cleaning
staff at hospitals, instead of doing the minimum the job required, took on new tasks from
chatting with patients to helping make nurses' jobs go more smoothly. Adding these more
absorbing challenges increased these cleaners' satisfaction and boosted their own views of
their skills. By reframing aspects of their duties, they helped make work more playful and
more fully their own. Even in low-autonomy jobs, Wrzesniewski and Dutton write, employees
can create new domains for mastery.
THE THREE LAWS OF MASTERY
Flow is essential to mastery. But flow doesn't guarantee mastery because the two concepts
operate on different horizons of time. One happens in a moment; the other unfolds over
months, years, sometimes decades. You and I each might reach flow tomorrow morning but
neither one of us will achieve mastery overnight.
So how can we enlist flow in the quest for something that goes deeper and endures longer?
What can we do to move toward mastery, one of the key elements of Type I behavior, in our
organizations and our lives? A few behavioral scientists have offered some initial answers
to those questions, and their findings suggest that mastery abides by three, somewhat
peculiar, laws.
Mastery Is a Mindset
As with so many things in life, the pursuit of mastery is all in our head. At least that's
what Carol Dweck has discovered.
Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has been studying motivation and
achievement in children and young adults for nearly forty years, amassing a body of
rigorous empirical research that has made her a superstar in contemporary behavioral
science. Dweck's signature insight is that what people believe shapes what people achieve.
Our beliefs about ourselves and the nature of our abilities what she calls our
self-theories determine how we interpret our experiences and can set the boundaries on
what we accomplish. Although her research looks mostly at notions of intelligence, her
findings apply with equal force to most human capabilities. And they yield the first law
of mastery:
Mastery is a mindset
.
According to Dweck, people can hold two different views of their own intelligence. Those
who have an entity theory believe that intelligence is just that an entity. It exists
within us, in a finite supply that we cannot increase. Those who subscribe to an
incremental theory take a different view. They believe that while intelligence may vary
slightly from person to person, it is ultimately something that, with effort, we can
increase. To analogize to physical qualities, incremental theorists consider intelligence
as something like strength. (Want to get stronger and more muscular? Start pumping iron.)
Entity theorists view it as something more like height. (Want to get taller? You're out of
luck.) If you believe intelligence is a fixed quantity, then every educational and
professional encounter becomes a measure of how much you have. If you believe intelligence
is something you can increase, then the same encounters become opportunities for growth.
In one view, intelligence is something you demonstrate; in the other, it's something you
develop.
Figure out for yourself what you want to be really good at, know that you'll never
really satisfy yourself that you've made it, and accept that that's okay.
ROBERT B. REICHFormer U.S. Secretary of Labor
The two self-theories lead down two very different paths one that heads toward mastery and
one that doesn't. For instance, consider goals. Dweck says they come in two
varieties performance goals and learning goals. Getting an A in French class is a
performance goal. Being able to speak French is a learning goal. Both goals are entirely
normal and pretty much universal, Dweck says, and both can fuel achievement. But only one
leads to mastery. In several studies, Dweck found that giving children a performance goal
(say, getting a high mark on a test) was effective for relatively straightforward problems
but often inhibited children's ability to apply the concepts to new situations. For
example, in one study, Dweck and a colleague asked junior high students to learn a set of
scientific principles, giving half of the students a performance goal and half a learning
goal. After both groups demonstrated they had grasped the material, researchers asked the
students to apply their knowledge to a new set of problems, related but not identical to
what they'd just studied. Students with learning goals scored significantly higher on
these novel challenges. They also worked longer and tried more solutions. As Dweck writes,
With a learning goal, students don't have to feel that they're already good at something
in order to hang in and keep trying. After all, their goal is to learn, not to prove
they're smart.
Indeed, the two self-theories take very different views of effort. To incremental
theorists, exertion is positive. Since incremental theorists believe that ability is
malleable, they see working harder as a way to get better. By contrast, says Dweck, the
entity theory . . . is a system that requires a diet of easy successes. In this schema, if
you have to work hard, it means you're not very good. People therefore choose easy targets
that, when hit, affirm their existing abilities but do little to expand them. In a sense,
entity theorists want to look like masters without expending the effort to attain mastery.
Finally, the two types of thinking trigger contrasting responses to adversity one that
Dweck calls helpless, the other, mastery-oriented. In a study of American fifth- and
sixth-graders, Dweck gave students eight conceptual problems they could solve, followed by
four they could not (because the questions were too advanced for children that age).
Students who subscribed to the idea that brain-power is fixed gave up quickly on the tough
problems and blamed their (lack of ) intelligence for their difficulties. Students with a
more expansive mindset kept working in spite of the difficulty and deployed far more
inventive strategies to find a solution. What did these students blame for their inability
to conquer the toughest problems? The answer, which surprised us, was that they didn't
blame anything, Dweck says. The young people recognized that setbacks were inevitable on
the road to mastery and that they could even be guideposts for the journey.
Dweck's insights map nicely to the behavioral distinctions underlying Motivation 2.0 and
Motivation 3.0. Type X behavior often holds an entity theory of intelligence, prefers
performance goals to learning goals, and disdains effort as a sign of weakness. Type I
behavior has an incremental theory of intelligence, prizes learning goals over performance
goals, and welcomes effort as a way to improve at something that matters. Begin with one
mindset, and mastery is impossible. Begin with the other, and it can be inevitable.
Mastery Is a Pain
Each summer, about twelve hundred young American men and women arrive at the United States
Military Academy at West Point to begin four years of study and to take their place in the
fabled long gray line. But before any of them sees a classroom, they go through seven
weeks of Cadet Basic Training otherwise known as Beast Barracks. By the time the summer
ends, one in twenty of these talented, dedicated young adults has dropped out. A group of
scholars two from West Point, another from the University of Pennsylvania, and a fourth
from the University of Michigan wanted to understand why some students continued on the
road toward military mastery and others got off at the first exit.
Try to pick a profession in which you enjoy even the most mundane, tedious parts. Then
you will always be happy.
WILL SHORTZPuzzle guru
Was it physical strength and athleticism? Intellect? Leadership ability? Well-roundedness?
None of the above. The best predictor of success, the researchers found, was the
prospective cadets' ratings on a noncognitive, non-physical trait known as grit defined as
perseverance and passion for long-term goals. The experience of these army
officers-in-training confirms the second law of mastery:
Mastery is a pain
.
As wonderful as flow is, the path to mastery becoming ever better at something you care
about is not lined with daisies and spanned by a rainbow. If it were, more of us would
make the trip. Mastery hurts. Sometimes many times it's not much fun. That is one lesson
of the work of psychologist Anders Ericsson, whose groundbreaking research on expert
performance has provided a new theory of what fosters mastery. As he puts it, Many
characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the results of intense
practice for a minimum of 10 years. Mastery of sports, music, business requires effort
(difficult, painful, excruciating, all-consuming effort) over a long time (not a week or a
month, but a decade). Sociologist Daniel Chambliss has referred to this as the mundanity
of excellence. Like Ericsson, Chambliss found in a three-year study of Olympic
swimmers that those who did the best typically spent the most time and effort on the
mundane activities that readied them for races. It's the same reason that, in another
study, the West Point grit researchers found that grittiness rather than IQ or
standardized test scores is the most accurate predictor of college grades. As they
explained, Whereas the importance of working harder is easily apprehended, the importance
of working longer without switching objectives may be less perceptible . . . in every
field, grit may be as essential as talent to high accomplishment.
Flow enters the picture here in two ways. If people are conscious of what puts them in
flow, they'll have a clearer idea of what they should devote the time and dedication to
master. And those moments of flow in the course of pursuing excellence can help people
through the rough parts. But in the end, mastery often involves working and working and
showing little improvement, perhaps with a few moments of flow pulling you along, then
making a little progress, and then working and working on that new, slightly higher
plateau again. It's grueling, to be sure. But that's not the problem; that's the solution.
As Carol Dweck says, Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means
you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work
for it. It would be an impoverished existence if you were not willing to value things and
commit yourself to working toward them.
Another doctor, one who lacks a Ph.D. but has a plaque in the Basketball Hall of Fame in
Springfield, Massachusetts, put it similarly. Being a professional, Julius Erving once
said, is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.
Mastery Is an Asymptote
To understand the final law of mastery, you need to know a little algebra and a little art
history.
From algebra, you might remember the concept of an asymptote. If not, maybe you'll
recognize it below. An asymptote (in this case, a horizontal asymptote) is a straight line
that a curve approaches but never quite reaches.
From art history, you might remember Paul CŽzanne, the nineteenth-century French painter.
You needn't remember much just that he was significant enough to have art critics and
scholars write about him. CŽzanne's most enduring paintings came late in his life. And one
reason for this, according to University of Chicago economist David Galenson, who's
studied the careers of artists, is that he was endlessly trying to realize his best work.
For CŽzanne, one critic wrote,
the ultimate synthesis of a design was never revealed in a flash; rather he approached it
with infinite precautions, stalking it, as it were, now from one point of view, now from
another. . . .
For him the synthesis was an asymptote toward which he was for ever approaching without
ever quite reaching it.
This is the nature of mastery:
Mastery is an asymptote.
You can approach it. You can home in on it. You can get really, really, really close to
it. But like CŽzanne, you can
never
touch it. Mastery is impossible to realize fully. Tiger Woods, perhaps the greatest
golfer of all time, has said flatly that he can that he must become better. He said it
when he was an amateur. He'll say it after his best outing or at the end of his finest
season. He's pursuing mastery. That's well-known. What's less well-known is that he
understands that he'll never get it. It will always hover beyond his grasp.
The mastery asymptote is a source of frustration. Why reach for something you can never
fully attain? But it's also a source of allure. Why
not
reach for it? The joy is in the pursuit more than the realization. In the end, mastery
attracts precisely because mastery eludes.
THE OXYGEN OF THE SOUL
The subjects were displaying the warning signs of generalized anxiety disorder, a mental
illness that afflicts roughly 3 percent of the adult population. According to the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(
DSM-IV
), the presence of any three of the following six symptoms indicates what could be a
serious problem:
¥ Restlessness or feeling keyed up or on edge
¥ Being easily fatigued
¥ Difficulty concentrating or mind going blank
¥ Irritability
¥ Muscle tension
¥ Sleep disturbance
These men and women seemed textbook cases. One person, who had previously glided through
life with equanimity, now felt tense, more hostile, angry, and irritated. Another reported
being more irritable, restless, and suffering from shorter concentration. Yet another
scribbled this self-description: Slept badly, listless, more nervous, more guarded. Some
people feared they were having a nervous breakdown. One person's mind was so muddied that
he inadvertently walked into a wall and broke his glasses.
Time for a trip to the psychiatrist or a prescription for antianxiety medicine?
No. It was time for people to let flow back into their lives. In the early 1970s,
Csikszentmihalyi conducted an experiment in which he asked people to record all the things
they did in their lives that were noninstrumental that is, small activities they undertook
not out of obligation or to achieve a particular objective, but because they enjoyed them.
Then he issued the following set of instructions:
Beginning [morning of target date], when you wake up and until 9:00 PM, we would like you
to act in a normal way, doing all the things you have to do, but not doing anything that
is play or noninstrumental.
In other words, he and his research team directed participants to scrub their lives of
flow. People who liked aspects of their work had to avoid situations that might trigger
enjoyment. People who relished demanding physical exercise had to remain sedentary. One
woman enjoyed washing dishes because it gave her something constructive to do, along with
time to fantasize free of guilt, but could wash dishes only when absolutely necessary.
The results were almost immediate. Even at the end of the first day, participants noticed
an increased sluggishness about their behavior. They began complaining of headaches. Most
reported difficulty concentrating, with thoughts [that] wander round in circles without
getting anywhere. Some felt sleepy, while others were too agitated to sleep. As
Csikszentmihalyi wrote, After just two days of deprivation . . . the general deterioration
in mood was so advanced that prolonging the experiment would have been unadvisable.
Two days. Forty-eight hours without flow plunged people into a state eerily similar to a
serious psychiatric disorder. The experiment suggests that flow, the deep sense of
engagement that Motivation 3.0 calls for, isn't a nicety. It's a necessity. We need it to
survive. It is the oxygen of the soul.
And one of Csikszentmihalyi's more surprising findings is that people are much more likely
to reach that flow state at work than in leisure. Work can often have the structure of
other autotelic experiences: clear goals, immediate feedback, challenges well matched to
our abilities. And when it does, we don't just enjoy it more, we do it better. That's why
it's so odd that organizations tolerate work environments that deprive large numbers of
people of these experiences. By offering a few more Goldilocks tasks, by looking for ways
to unleash the positive side of the Sawyer Effect, organizations can help their own cause
and enrich people's lives.
Csikszentmihalyi grasped this essential reality more than thirty years ago, when he wrote,
There is no reason to believe any longer that only irrelevant Ôplay' can be enjoyed, while
the serious business of life must be borne as a burdensome cross. Once we realize that the
boundaries between work and play are artificial, we can take matters in hand and begin the
difficult task of making life more livable.
But if we're looking for guidance on how to do this right on how to make mastery an ethic
for living our best role models are probably not sitting around a boardroom table or
working in the office down the hall.
Over lunch, Csikszentmihalyi and I talked about children. A little kid's life bursts with
autotelic experiences. Children careen from one flow moment to another, animated by a
sense of joy, equipped with a mindset of possibility, and working with the dedication of a
West Point cadet. They use their brains and their bodies to probe and draw feedback from
the environment in an endless pursuit of mastery.
Then at some point in their lives they don't. What happens?
You start to get ashamed that what you're doing is childish, Csikszentmihalyi explained.
What a mistake. Perhaps you and I and all the other adults in charge of things are the
ones who are immature. It goes back to Csikszentmihalyi's experience on the train,
wondering how grown-ups could have gotten things so wrong. Our circumstances may be less
dire, but the observation is no less acute. Left to their own devices, Csikszentmihalyi
says, children seek out flow with the inevitability of a natural law. So should we all.
Drive
CHAPTER 6
Purpose
W
e know from statisticians that demographics is destiny. And we know from the Rolling
Stones that you can't always get what you want. What we don't know is what happens when
these two indomitable principles sit down, pour themselves a drink, and get to know each
other better.
But we're about to find out.
In 2006, the first members of the baby-boom generation began turning sixty. On birthdays
with big round numbers, people usually stop, reflect, and take stock of their lives. And
I've found that when boomers, in the United States and elsewhere, reach this milestone,
they typically move through a three-stage reaction.
In the first stage, they ask: How the heck did I get to be sixty? When their odometer
flips to 6-0, people often are surprised and slightly alarmed. Sixty, they think, is old.
They tally their regrets and confront the reality that Mick Jagger and crew were right,
that they didn't always get what they wanted.
But then the second stage kicks in. In the not-so-distant past, turning sixty meant that
you were somewhat, ahem, long in the tooth. But at the beginning of the twenty-first
century, anyone who's healthy enough to have made it six decades is probably healthy
enough to hang on a fair bit longer. According to United Nations data, a sixty-year-old
American man can expect to live for another twenty-plus years; a sixty-year-old American
woman will be around for another quarter of a century. In Japan, a sixty-year-old man can
expect to live past his eighty-second birthday, a sixty-year-old woman to nearly
eighty-eight. The pattern is the same in many other prosperous countries. In France,
Israel, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, and elsewhere, if you've reached the age of sixty,
you're more than likely to live into your eighties. And this realization brings with it a
certain relief. Whew, the boomer in Toronto or Osaka sighs. I've got a couple more decades.
But the relief quickly dissipates because almost as soon as the sigh fades, people enter
the third stage. Upon comprehending that they could have another twenty-five years,
sixty-year-old boomers look
back
twenty-five years to when they were thirty-five and a sudden thought clonks them on the
side of the head. Wow. That sure happened fast, they say. Will the next twenty-five years
race by like that? If so, when am I going to do something that matters? When am I going to
live my best life? When am I going to make a difference in the world?
Those questions, which swirl through conversations taking place at boomer kitchen tables
around the world, may sound touchy-feely. But they're now occurring at a rate that is
unprecedented in human civilization. Consider: Boomers are the largest demographic cohort
in most western countries, as well as in places like Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the United States alone has about 78 million
boomers which means that, on average, each year more than four million Americans hit this
soul-searching, life-pondering birthday. That's more than 11,000 people each day, more
than 450 every hour.
In other words, in America alone, one hundred boomers turn sixty every thirteen minutes
.
Every thirteen minutes another hundred people members of the wealthiest and best-educated
generation the world has ever known begin reckoning with their mortality and asking deep
questions about meaning, significance, and what they truly want.
One hundred people. Every thirteen minutes. Every hour. Of every day. Until 2024.
When the cold front of demographics meets the warm front of unrealized dreams, the result
will be a thunderstorm of purpose the likes of which the world has never seen.
THE PURPOSE MOTIVE
The first two legs of the Type I tripod, autonomy and mastery, are essential. But for
proper balance we need a third leg purpose, which provides a context for its two mates.
Autonomous people working toward mastery perform at very high levels. But those who do so
in the service of some greater objective can achieve even more. The most deeply motivated
people not to mention those who are most productive and satisfied hitch their desires to a
cause larger than themselves.
Motivation 2.0, however, doesn't recognize purpose as a motivator. The Type X operating
system doesn't banish the concept, but it relegates it to the status of ornament a nice
accessory if you want it, so long as it doesn't get in the way of the important stuff. Yet
by taking this view, Motivation 2.0 neglects a crucial part of who we are. From the moment
that human beings first stared into the sky, contemplated their place in the universe, and
tried to create something that bettered the world and outlasted their lives, we have been
purpose seekers. Purpose provides activation energy for living, psychologist Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi told me in an interview. I think that evolution has had a hand in
selecting people who had a sense of doing something beyond themselves.
I believe wholeheartedly that a new form of capitalism is emerging. More stakeholders
(customers, employees, shareholders, and the larger community) want their businesses to .
. . have a purpose bigger than their product.
MATS LEDERHAUSENInvestor and formerMcDonald's executive
Motivation 3.0 seeks to reclaim this aspect of the human condition. Baby boomers around
the world because of the stage of their lives and the size of their numbers are nudging
purpose closer to the cultural center. In response, business has begun to rethink how
purpose figures in what it does. As an emotional catalyst, wealth maximization lacks the
power to fully mobilize human energies, says strategy guru (and boomer) Gary Hamel. Those
staggering levels of worker disengagement I described in the previous chapter have a
companion trend that companies are only starting to recognize: an equally sharp rise in
volunteerism, especially in the United States. These diverging lines compensated
engagement going down, uncompensated effort going up suggest that volunteer work is
nourishing people in ways that paid work simply is not.
We're learning that the profit motive, potent though it is, can be an insufficient impetus
for both individuals and organizations. An equally powerful source of energy, one we've
often neglected or dismissed as unrealistic, is what we might call the purpose motive.
This is the final big distinction between the two operating systems. Motivation 2.0
centered on profit maximization. Motivation 3.0 doesn't reject profits, but it places
equal emphasis on purpose maximization. We see the first stirrings of this new purpose
motive in three realms of organizational life goals, words, and policies.
In a curious way, age is simpler than youth, for it has so many fewer options.
STANLEY KUNITZFormer U.S. poet laureate
Goals
Boomers aren't singing alone in their chorus of purpose. Joining them, and using the same
hymnbook, are their sons and daughters known as Generation Y, the millennials, or the echo
boomers. These young adults, who have recently begun entering the workforce themselves,
are shifting the center of gravity in organizations by their very presence. As the writer
Sylvia Hewlett has found in her research, the two bookend generations are redefining
success [and] are willing to accept a radically Ôremixed' set of rewards. Neither
generation rates money as the most important form of compensation. Instead they choose a
range of nonmonetary factors from a great team to the ability to give back to society
through work. And if they can't find that satisfying package of rewards in an existing
organization, they'll create a venture of their own.
Take the case of American Gen Y-er Blake Mycoskie and TOMS Shoes, the company he launched
in 2006. TOMS doesn't fit snugly into the traditional business boxes. It offers hip,
canvas, flat-soled shoes. But every time TOMS sells a pair of shoes to you, me, or your
next-door neighbor, it gives away another pair of new shoes to a child in a developing
country. Is TOMS a charity that finances its operation with shoe sales? Or is it a
business that sacrifices its earnings in order to do good? It's neither and it's both. The
answer is so confusing, in fact, that TOMS Shoes had to address the question directly on
its website, just below information on how to return a pair that's too big. TOMS, the site
explains, is a for-profit company with giving at its core.
Got it? No? Okay, try this: The company's business model transforms our customers into
benefactors. Better? Maybe. Weirder? Certainly. Ventures like TOMS blur, perhaps even
shatter, the existing categories. Their goals, and the way companies reach them, are so
incompatible to Motivation 2.0 that if TOMS had to rely on this twentieth-century
operating system, the whole endeavor would seize up and crash in the entrepreneurial
equivalent of a blue screen of death.
Motivation 3.0, by contrast, is expressly built for purpose maximization. In fact, the
rise of purpose maximizers is one reason we need the new operating system in the first
place. As I explained in Chapter 1, operations like TOMS are on the vanguard of a broader
rethinking of how people organize what they do. For benefit organizations, B corporations,
and low-profit limited-liability corporations all recast the goals of the traditional
business enterprise. And all are becoming more prevalent as a new breed of businessperson
seeks purpose with the fervor that traditional economic theory says entrepreneurs seek
profit. Even cooperatives an older business model with motives other than profit
maximization are moving from the shaggy edge to the clean-cut center. According to writer
Marjorie Kelly, in the last three decades, worldwide membership in co-ops has doubled to
800 million people. In the United States alone, more people belong to a co-op than own
shares in the stock market. And the idea is spreading. In Colombia, Kelly notes, SaludCoop
provides health-care services to a quarter of the population. In Spain, the Mondrag—n
Corporaci—n Cooperativa is the nation's seventh largest industrial concern.
These not only for profit enterprises are a far cry from the socially responsible
businesses that have been all the rage for the last fifteen years but have rarely
delivered on their promise. The aims of these Motivation 3.0 companies are not to chase
profit while trying to stay ethical and law-abiding. Their goal is to pursue purpose and
to use profit as the catalyst rather than the objective.
Words
In the spring of 2009, as the world economy was reeling from a once-in-a-generation crisis
and the financial shenanigans that stoked it, a few Harvard Business School students
glanced in the mirror and wondered if they were the problem. The people they'd aspired to
be financiers and corporate dealmakers weren't, it turned out, heroes in an epic tale, but
villains in a darker story. Many of these high-profile businesspeople were the ones who
pushed the financial system to the brink. Meanwhile, these young men and women looked
among their classmates and saw the seeds of similar behavior. In one survey of MBA
students a few years earlier, a whopping 56 percent admitted to cheating regularly.
So a handful of Harvard second-years, fearing that what was once a badge of honor had
become three scarlet letters, did what business students are trained to do. They made a
plan. Together they fashioned what they called The MBA Oath a Hippocratic oath for
business grads in which they pledge their fealty to causes above and beyond the bottom
line. It's not a legal document. It's a code of conduct. And the conduct it recommends, as
well as the very words it uses, leans more toward purpose maximization than profit
maximization.
From the first sentence, the oath rings with the sounds of Motivation 3.0:
As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources
together to create value that no single individual can create alone, it begins. And on it
goes for nearly five hundred words. I will safeguard the interests of my shareholders,
co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate, the oath-takers pledge. I will
strive to create sustainable economic, social, and environmental prosperity worldwide.
These words purpose, greater good, sustainable don't come from the Type X dictionary. One
rarely hears them in business school because, after all, that's not what business school
is supposed to be about. Yet students at arguably the world's most powerful MBA factory
thought otherwise. And in just a few weeks, roughly one-quarter of the graduating class
had taken the oath and signed the pledge. In launching the effort, Max Anderson, one of
the student founders, said: My hope is that at our 25th reunion our class will not be
known for how much money we made or how much money we gave back to the school, but for how
the world was a better place as a result of our leadership.
Words matter. And if you listen carefully, you might begin to hear a slightly
different slightly more purpose-oriented dialect. Gary Hamel, whom I mentioned above,
says, The goals of management are usually described in words like Ôefficiency,'
Ôadvantage,' Ôvalue,' Ôsuperiority,' Ôfocus,' and Ôdifferentiation.' Important as these
objectives are, they lack the power to rouse human hearts. Business leaders, he says, must
find ways to infuse mundane business activities with deeper, soul-stirring ideals, such as
honor, truth, love, justice, and beauty. Humanize what people say and you may well
humanize what they do.
That's the thinking behind the simple and effective way Robert B. Reich, former U.S. labor
secretary, gauges the health of an organization. He calls it the pronoun test. When he
visits a workplace, he'll ask the people employed there some questions about the company.
He listens to the substance of their response, of course. But most of all, he listens for
the pronouns they use. Do the workers refer to the company as they? Or do they describe it
in terms of we? They companies and we companies, he says, are very different places. And
in Motivation 3.0, we wins.
Policies
Between the words businesses use and the goals they seek sit the policies they implement
to turn the former into the latter. Here, too, one can detect the early tremors of a
different approach. For example, many companies in the last decade spent considerable time
and effort crafting corporate ethics guidelines. Yet instances of unethical behavior don't
seem to have declined. Valuable though those guidelines can be, as a policy they can
unintentionally move purposeful behavior out of the Type I schema and into Type X. As
Harvard Business School professor Max Bazerman has explained:
Say you take people who are motivated to behave nicely, then give them a fairly weak set
of ethical standards to meet. Now, instead of asking them to do it because it's the right
thing to do, you've essentially given them an alternate set of standards do this so you
can check off all these boxes.
The value of a life can be measured by one's ability to affect the destiny of one less
advantaged. Since death is an absolute certainty for everyone, the important variable is
the quality of life one leads between the times of birth and death.
BILL STRICKLANDFounder of the ManchesterCraftsmen's Guild, and MacArthurgenius award winner
Imagine an organization, for example, that believes in affirmative action one that wants
to make the world a better place by creating a more diverse workforce. By reducing ethics
to a checklist, suddenly affirmative action is just a bunch of requirements that the
organization must meet to show that it isn't discriminating.
Now the organization isn't focused on affirmatively pursuing diversity but rather on
making sure that all the boxes are checked off to show that what it did is OK (and so it
won't get sued). Before, its workers had an intrinsic motivation to do the right thing,
but now they have an extrinsic motivation to make sure that the company doesn't get sued
or fined.
In other words, people might meet the minimal ethical standards to avoid punishment, but
the guidelines have done nothing to inject purpose into the corporate bloodstream. The
better approach could be to enlist the power of autonomy in the service of purpose
maximization. Two intriguing examples demonstrate what I mean.
First, many psychologists and economists have found that the correlation between money and
happiness is weak that past a certain (and quite modest) level, a larger pile of cash
doesn't bring people a higher level of satisfaction. But a few social scientists have
begun adding a bit more nuance to this observation. According to Lara Aknin and Elizabeth
Dunn, sociologists at the University of British Columbia, and Michael Norton, a
psychologist at the Harvard Business School,
how
people spend their money may be at least as important as
how much
money they earn. In particular, spending money on other people (buying flowers for your
spouse rather than an MP3 player for yourself ) or on a cause (donating to a religious
institution rather than going for an expensive haircut) can actually increase our
subjective well-being. In fact, Dunn and Norton propose turning their findings on what
they call pro-social spending into corporate policy. According to
The Boston Globe
, they believe that companies can improve their employees' emotional well-being by
shifting some of their budget for charitable giving so that individual employees are given
sums to donate, leaving them happier even as the charities of their choice benefit. In
other words, handing individual employees control over how the organization gives back to
the community might do more to improve their overall satisfaction than one more if-then
financial incentive.
Another study offers a second possible purpose-centered policy prescription. Physicians in
high-profile settings like the Mayo Clinic face pressures and demands that can often lead
to burnout. But field research at the prestigious medical facility found that letting
doctors spend one day a week on the aspect of their job that was most meaningful to
them whether patient care, research, or community service could reduce the physical and
emotional exhaustion that accompanies their work. Doctors who participated in this trial
policy had half the burnout rate of those who did not. Think of it as 20 percent time with
a purpose.
THE GOOD LIFE
Each year about thirteen hundred seniors graduate from the University of Rochester and
begin their journey into what many of their parents and professors like to call the real
world. Edward Deci, Richard Ryan, and their colleague Christopher Niemiec decided to ask a
sample of these soon-to-be graduates about their life goals and then to follow up with
them early in their careers to see how they were doing. While much social science research
is done with student volunteers, scientists rarely track students after they've packed up
their diplomas and exited the campus gates. And these researchers wanted to study the
post-college time frame because it represents a critical development period that marks
people's transitions to their adult identities and lives.
Some of the U of R students had what Deci, Ryan, and Niemiec label extrinsic
aspirations for instance, to become wealthy or to achieve fame what we might call profit
goals. Others had intrinsic aspirations to help others improve their lives, to learn, and
to grow or what we might think of as purpose goals. After these students had been out in
the real word for between one and two years, the researchers tracked them down to see how
they were faring.
The people who'd had purpose goals and felt they were attaining them reported higher
levels of satisfaction and subjective well-being than when they were in college, and quite
low levels of anxiety and depression. That's probably no surprise. They'd set a personally
meaningful goal and felt they were reaching it. In that situation, most of us would likely
feel pretty good, too.
But the results for people with profit goals were more complicated. Those who said they
were attaining their goals accumulating wealth, winning acclaim reported levels of
satisfaction, self-esteem, and positive affect no higher than when they were students. In
other words, they'd reached their goals, but it didn't make them any happier. What's more,
graduates with profit goals showed
increases
in anxiety, depression, and other negative indicators again, even though they were
attaining their goals.
One cannot lead a life that is truly excellent without feeling that one belongs to
something greater and more permanent than oneself.
MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI
These findings are rather striking, the researchers write, as they suggest that attainment
of a particular set of goals [in this case, profit goals] has no impact on well-being and
actually contributes to i ll-being.
When I discussed these results with Deci and Ryan, they were especially emphatic about
their significance because the findings suggest that even when we
do
get what we want, it's not always what we need. People who are very high in extrinsic
goals for wealth are more likely to attain that wealth, but they're still unhappy, Ryan
told me.
Or as Deci put it, The typical notion is this: You value something. You attain it. Then
you're better off as a function of it. But what we find is that there are certain things
that if you value and if you attain them, you're
worse
off as a result of it, not better off.
Failing to understand this conundrum that satisfaction depends not merely on having goals,
but on having the right goals can lead sensible people down self-destructive paths. If
people chase profit goals, reach those goals, and still don't feel any better about their
lives, one response is to increase the size and scope of the goals to seek more money or
greater outside validation. And that can drive them down a road of further unhappiness
thinking it's the road to happiness, Ryan said.
One of the reasons for anxiety and depression in the high attainers is that they're not
having good relationships. They're busy making money and attending to themselves and that
means that there's less room in their lives for love and attention and caring and empathy
and the things that truly count, Ryan added.
And if the broad contours of these findings are true for individuals, why shouldn't they
also be true for organizations which, of course, are collections of individuals? I don't
mean to say that profit doesn't matter. It does. The profit motive has been an important
fuel for achievement. But it's not the only motive. And it's not the most important one.
Indeed, if we were to look at history's greatest achievements from the printing press to
constitutional democracy to cures for deadly diseases the spark that kept the creators
working deep into the night was purpose at least as much as profit. A healthy society and
healthy business organizations begins with purpose and considers profit a way to move
toward that end or a happy by-product of its attainment.
And here the boomers maybe, just maybe can take the lead. On the subjects of autonomy and
mastery, adults should look to the eloquent example of children. But perhaps purpose is
another matter. Being able to contemplate the big picture, to ponder one's own mortality,
to understand the paradox that attaining certain goals isn't the answer seem to require
having spent a few years on the planet. And since the planet very soon will contain more
people over age sixty-five than under age five for the first time in its existence, the
timing couldn't be better.
It's in our nature to seek purpose. But that nature is now being revealed and expressed on
a scale that is demographically unprecedented and, until recently, scarcely imaginable.
The consequences could rejuvenate our businesses and remake our world.
A CENTRAL IDEA of this book has been the mismatch between what science knows and what
business does. The gap is wide. Its existence is alarming. And though closing it seems
daunting, we have reasons to be optimistic.
The scientists who study human motivation, several of whom we've encountered in this book,
offer us a sharper and more accurate account of both human performance and the human
condition. The truths they've revealed are simple, yet powerful. The science shows that
those typical twentieth-century carrot-and-stick motivators things we consider somehow a
natural part of human enterprise can sometimes work. But they're effective in only a
surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. The science shows that if-then rewards the
mainstays of the Motivation 2.0 operating system not only are ineffective in many
situations, but also can crush the high-level, creative, conceptual abilities that are
central to current and future economic and social progress. The science shows that the
secret to high performance isn't our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive,
but our third drive our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand
our abilities, and to live a life of purpose.
Bringing our businesses in sync with these truths won't be easy. Unlearning old ideas is
difficult, undoing old habits even harder. And I'd be less sanguine about the prospects of
closing the motivation gap anytime soon, if it weren't for this: The science confirms what
we already know in our hearts.
We know that human beings are not merely smaller, slower, better-smelling horses galloping
after that day's carrot. We know if we've spent time with young children or remember
ourselves at our best that we're not destined to be passive and compliant. We're designed
to be active and engaged. And we know that the richest experiences in our lives aren't
when we're clamoring for validation from others, but when we're listening to our own
voice doing something that matters, doing it well, and doing it in the service of a cause
larger than ourselves.
So, in the end, repairing the mismatch and bringing our understanding of motivation into
the twenty-first century is more than an essential move for business. It's an affirmation
of our humanity.
Drive
Part Three
The Type I Toolkit
Welcome to the Type I Toolkit.
This is your guide to taking the ideas in this book and putting them into action.
Whether you're looking for a better way to run your organization, navigate your career,
or help your kids, there's a tip, a best practice, or a recommended book for you. And if
ever you need a quick summary of
Drive,
or you want to look up one of its terms, you can find that here, too.
You don't have to read this section in any particular order. Pick an entry that
interests you and dive right in. Like any good toolkit, this one is versatile enough for
you to return to again and again.
P.S. I'd love to hear your suggestions for what to include in future editions of the
Type I Toolkit. Send your ideas directly to me at dhp@danpink.com.
WHAT'S IN THIS TOOLKIT
Type I for Individuals: Nine Strategies for Awakening Your Motivation
Type I for Organizations: Nine Ways to Improve Your Company, Office, or Group
The Zen of Compensation: Paying People the Type I Way
Type I for Parents and Educators: Nine Ideas for Helping Our Kids
The Type I Reading List: Fifteen Essential Books
Listen to the Gurus: Six Business Thinkers Who Get It
The Type I Fitness Plan: Four Tips for Getting (and Staying) Motivated to Exercise
Drive
: The Recap
Drive
: The Glossary
The
Drive
Discussion Guide: Twenty Conversation Starters to Keep You Thinking and Talking
Find Out More About Yourself and This Topic
Type I for Individuals: Nine Strategies for Awakening Your Motivation
Type I's are made, not born. Although the world is awash in extrinsic motivators,
there's a lot we can do to bring more autonomy, mastery, and purpose into our work and
life. Here are nine exercises to get you on the right track.
GIVE YOURSELF A FLOW TEST
M
ihaly Csikszentmihalyi did more than discover the concept of flow. He also introduced an
ingenious new technique to measure it. Csikszentmihalyi and his University of Chicago team
equipped participants in their research studies with electronic pagers. Then they paged
people at random intervals (approximately eight times a day) for a week, asking them to
describe their mental state at that moment. Compared with previous methods, these
real-time reports proved far more honest and revealing.
You can use Csikszentmihalyi's methodological innovation in your own quest for mastery by
giving yourself a flow test. Set a reminder on your computer or mobile phone to go off at
forty random times in a week. Each time your device beeps, write down what you're doing,
how you're feeling, and whether you're in flow. Record your observations, look at the
patterns, and consider the following questions:
¥ Which moments produced feelings of flow? Where were you? What were you working on? Who
were you with?
¥ Are certain times of day more flow-friendly than others? How could you restructure your
day based on your findings?
¥ How might you increase the number of optimal experiences and reduce the moments when you
felt disengaged or distracted?
¥ If you're having doubts about your job or career, what does this exercise tell you about
your true source of intrinsic motivation?
FIRST, ASK A BIG QUESTION . . .
I
n 1962, Clare Boothe Luce, one of the first women to serve in the U.S. Congress, offered
some advice to President John F. Kennedy. A great man, she told him, is one sentence.
Abraham Lincoln's sentence was: He preserved the union and freed the slaves. Franklin
Roosevelt's was: He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war.
Luce feared that Kennedy's attention was so splintered among different priorities that his
sentence risked becoming a muddled paragraph.
You don't have to be a president of the United States or of your local gardening club to
learn from this tale. One way to orient your life toward greater purpose is to think about
your sentence. Maybe it's: He raised four kids who became happy and healthy adults. Or She
invented a device that made people's lives easier. Or He cared for every person who walked
into his office regardless of whether that person could pay. Or She taught two generations
of children how to read.
As you contemplate your purpose, begin with the big question:
What's your sentence?
. . . THEN KEEP ASKING A SMALL QUESTION
T
he big question is necessary, but not sufficient. That's where the small question comes
in. Real achievement doesn't happen overnight. As anyone who's trained for a marathon,
learned a new language, or run a successful division can attest, you spend a lot more time
grinding through tough tasks than you do basking in applause.
Here's something you can do to keep yourself motivated. At the end of each day, ask
yourself whether you were better today than you were yesterday. Did you do more? Did you
do it well? Or to get specific, did you learn your ten vocabulary words, make your eight
sales calls, eat your five servings of fruits and vegetables, write your four pages? You
don't have to be flawless each day. Instead, look for small measures of improvement such
as how long you practiced your saxophone or whether you held off on checking e-mail until
you finished that report you needed to write. Reminding yourself that you don't need to be
a master by day 3 is the best way of ensuring you will be one by day 3,000.
So before you go to sleep each night, ask yourself the small question:
Was I better today than yesterday?
TAKE A SAGMEISTER
T
he designer Stefan Sagmeister has found a brilliant way to ensure he's living a Type I
life. Think about the standard pattern in developed countries, he says. People usually
spend the first twenty-five or so years of their lives learning, the next forty or so
years working, and the final twenty-five in retirement. That boilerplate timeline got
Sagmeister wondering: Why not snip five years from retirement and sprinkle them into your
working years?
So every seven years, Sagmeister closes his graphic design shop, tells his clients he
won't be back for a year, and goes off on a 365-day sabbatical. He uses the time to
travel, to live places he's never been, and to experiment with new projects. It sounds
risky, I know. But he says the ideas he generates during the year off often provide his
income for the next seven years. Taking a Sagmeister, as I now call it, requires a fair
bit of planning and saving, of course. But doesn't forgoing that big-screen TV seem a
small price to pay for an unforgettable and un-get-backable year of personal exploration?
The truth is, this idea is more realistic than many of us realize. Which is why I hope to
take a Sagmeister in a couple of years and why you should consider it, too.
GIVE YOURSELF A PERFORMANCE REVIEW
P
erformance reviews, those annual or biannual rituals of organizational life, are about as
enjoyable as a toothache and as productive as a train wreck. Nobody likes them not the
giver, not the receiver. They don't really help us achieve mastery since the feedback
often comes six months after the work is complete. (Imagine Serena Williams or Twyla Tharp
seeing their results or reading reviews only twice a year.) And yet managers keep on
hauling employees into their offices for those awkward, painful encounters.
Maybe there's a better way. Maybe, as Douglas McGregor and others have suggested, we
should give ourselves our own performance reviews. Here's how. Figure out your
goals mostly learning goals, but also a few performance goals and then every month, call
yourself to your office and give yourself an appraisal. How are you faring? Where are you
falling short? What tools, information, or support might you need to do better?
Some other hints:
¥ Set both smaller and larger goals so that when it comes time to evaluate yourself you've
already accomplished some whole tasks.
¥ Make sure you understand how every aspect of your work relates to your larger purpose.
¥ Be brutally honest. This exercise is aimed at helping you improve performance and
achieve mastery so if you rationalize failures or gloss over your mistakes instead of
learning from them, you're wasting your time.
And if doing this solo isn't your thing, gather a small group of colleagues for regular
peer-based do-it-yourself performance reviews. If your comrades really care, they'll tell
you the truth and hold you accountable. One last question for bosses: Why in God's name
are you not encouraging all your employees to do this?
GET UNSTUCK BY GOING OBLIQUE
E
ven the most intrinsically motivated person sometimes gets stuck. So here's a simple,
easy, and fun way to power out of your mental morass. In 1975, producer Brian Eno and
artist Peter Schmidt published a set of one hundred cards containing strategies that
helped them overcome the pressure-packed moments that always accompany a deadline. Each
card contains a single, often inscrutable, question or statement to push you out of a
mental rut. (Some examples:
What would your closest friend do? Your mistake was a hidden intention. What is the
simplest solution? Repetition is a form of change
.
Don't avoid what is easy
.) If you're working on a project and find yourself stymied, pull an Oblique card from the
deck. These brain bombs are a great way to keep your mind open despite constraints you
can't control. You can buy the deck at or follow one of the Twitter accounts inspired by
the strategies, such as: .
MOVE FIVE STEPS CLOSER TO MASTERY
O
ne key to mastery is what Florida State University psychology professor Anders Ericsson
calls deliberate practice a lifelong period of . . . effort to improve performance in a
specific domain. Deliberate practice isn't running a few miles each day or banging on the
piano for twenty minutes each morning. It's much more purposeful, focused, and, yes,
painful. Follow these steps over and over again for a decade and you just might become a
master:
¥
Remember that deliberate practice has one objective: to improve performance.
People who play tennis once a week for years don't get any better if they do the same
thing each time, Ericsson has said. Deliberate practice is about changing your
performance, setting new goals and straining yourself to reach a bit higher each time.
¥
Repeat, repeat, repeat
.
Repetition matters. Basketball greats don't shoot ten free throws at the end of team
practice; they shoot five hundred.
¥
Seek constant, critical feedback
.
If you don't know how you're doing, you won't know what to improve.
¥
Focus ruthlessly on where you need help
.
While many of us work on what we're already good at, says Ericsson, those who get better
work on their weaknesses.
¥
Prepare for the process to be mentally and physically exhausting
.
That's why so few people commit to it, but that's why it works.
TAKE A PAGE FROM WEBBER AND A CARD FROM YOUR POCKET
I
n his insightful book
Rules of Thumb
,
Fast Company
magazine cofounder Alan Webber offers a smart and simple exercise for assessing whether
you're on the path to autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Get a few blank three-by-five-inch
cards. On one of the cards, write your answer to this question: What gets you up in the
morning? Now, on the other side of the card, write your answer to another question: What
keeps you up at night? Pare each response to a single sentence. And if you don't like an
answer, toss the card and try again until you've crafted something you can live with. Then
read what you've produced. If both answers give you a sense of meaning and direction,
Congratulations! says Webber. Use them as your compass, checking from time to time to see
if they're still true. If you don't like one or both of your answers, it opens up a new
question: What are you going to do about it?
CREATE YOUR OWN MOTIVATIONAL POSTER
Office posters that try to motivate us have a grim reputation. As one wag put it, For the
last two decades, motivational posters have inflicted unimaginable suffering on the
workplaces of the world. But who knows? Perhaps the first one was a thing of beauty. Maybe
those cave drawings in Lascaux, France, were some Paleolithic motivational speaker's way
of saying, If you know where you're going, you'll never take a wrong turn. Now you've got
a chance to fight back (or perhaps to reclaim that ancient legacy). Thanks to a number of
websites, you can create your own motivational posters and you no longer have to settle
for photos of kittens climbing out of baskets. You can be as serious or silly with this
exercise as you like. Motivation is deeply personal and only you know what words or images
will resonate with you.
Try any of these sites:
Despair Inc ()
Big Huge Labs ()
Automotivator ()
To offer you some, er, motivation, here are two posters I created myself:
Type I for Organizations: Nine Ways to Improve Your Company, Office, or Group
Whether you're the CEO or the new intern, you can help create engaging, productive
workplaces that foster Type I behavior. Here are nine ways to begin pulling your
organization out of the past and into the brighter world of Motivation 3.0.
TRY 20 PERCENT TIME WITH TRAINING WHEELS
Y
ou've read about the wonders of 20 percent time where organizations encourage employees to
spend one-fifth of their hours working on any project they want. And if you've ever used
Gmail or read Google News, you've benefited from the results. But for all the virtues of
this Type I innovation, putting such a policy in place can seem daunting. How much will it
cost? What if it doesn't work? If you're feeling skittish, here's an idea: Go with a more
modest version 20 percent time . . . with training wheels. Start with, say, 10 percent
time. That's just one afternoon of a five-day workweek. (Who among us hasn't wasted that
amount of time at work anyway?) And instead of committing to it forever, try it for six
months. By creating this island of autonomy, you'll help people act on their great ideas
and convert their downtime into more productive time. And who knows? Someone in your
operation just might invent the next Post-it note.
ENCOURAGE PEER-TO-PEER NOW THAT REWARDS
K
imley-Horn and Associates, a civil engineering firm in Raleigh, North Carolina, has
established a reward system that gets the Type I stamp of approval: At any point, without
asking permission, anyone in the company can award a $50 bonus to any of her colleagues.
It works because it's real-time, and it's not handed down from any management, the firm's
human resources director told
Fast Company
. Any employee who does something exceptional receives recognition from their peers within
minutes. Because these bonuses are noncontingent now that rewards, they avoid the seven
deadly flaws of most corporate carrots. And because they come from a colleague, not a
boss, they carry a different (and perhaps deeper) meaning. You could even say they're
motivating.
CONDUCT AN AUTONOMY AUDIT
H
ow much autonomy do the people in your organization really have? If you're like most
folks, you probably don't have a clue. Nobody does. But there's a way to find out with an
autonomy audit. Ask everyone in your department or on your team to respond to these four
questions with a numerical ranking (using a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 meaning almost none
and 10 meaning a huge amount):
1.
How much autonomy do you have over your tasks at work your main responsibilities and
what you do in a given day?
2.
How much autonomy do you have over your time at work for instance, when you arrive,
when you leave, and how you allocate your hours each day?
3.
How much autonomy do you have over your team at work that is, to what extent are you
able to choose the people with whom you typically collaborate?
4.
How much autonomy do you have over your technique at work how you actually perform the
main responsibilities of your job?
Make sure all responses are anonymous. Then tabulate the results. What's the employee
average? The figure will fall somewhere on a 40-point autonomy scale (with 0 being a North
Korean prison and 40 being Woodstock). Compare that number to people's perceptions.
Perhaps the boss thought everyone had plenty of freedom but the audit showed an average
autonomy rating of only 15. Also calculate separate results for task, time, team, and
technique. A healthy overall average can sometimes mask a problem in a particular area. An
overall autonomy rating of, say, 27 isn't bad. However, if that average consists of 8 each
for task, technique, and team, but only 3 for time, you've identified an autonomy weak
spot in the organization.
It's remarkable sometimes how little the people running organizations know about the
experiences of the people working around them. But it's equally remarkable how often
leaders are willing to do things differently if they see real data. That's what an
autonomy audit can do. And if you include a section in your audit for employees to jot
down their own ideas about increasing autonomy, you might even find some great solutions.
TAKE THREE STEPS TOWARD GIVING UP CONTROL
T
ype X bosses relish control. Type I bosses
relinquish
control. Extending people the freedom they need to do great work is usually wise, but
it's not always easy. So if you're feeling the urge to control, here are three ways to
begin letting go for your own benefit and your team's:
1.
Involve people in goal-setting
.
Would you rather set your own goals or have them foisted upon you? Thought so. Why should
those working with you be any different? A considerable body of research shows that
individuals are far more engaged when they're pursuing goals they had a hand in creating.
So bring employees into the process. They could surprise you: People often have higher
aims than the ones you assign them.
2.
Use noncontrolling language
.
Next time you're about to say must or should, try saying think about or consider instead.
A small change in wording can help promote engagement over compliance and might even
reduce some people's urge to defy. Think about it. Or at least consider it, okay?
3.
Hold office hours
.
Sometimes you need to summon people into your office. But sometimes it's wise to let them
come to you. Take a cue from college professors and set aside one or two hours a week when
your schedule is clear and any employee can come in and talk to you about anything that's
on her mind. Your colleagues might benefit and you might learn something.
PLAY WHOSE PURPOSE IS IT ANYWAY?
T
his is another exercise designed to close the gap between perception and reality. Gather
your team, your department, or, if you can, all the employees in your outfit. Hand
everyone a blank three-by-five-inch card. Then ask each person to write down his or her
one-sentence answer to the following question: What is our company's (or organization's)
purpose? Collect the cards and read them aloud. What do they tell you? Are the answers
similar, everyone aligned along a common purpose? Or are they all over the place some
people believing one thing, others something completely different, and still others
without even a guess? For all the talk about culture, alignment, and mission, most
organizations do a pretty shabby job of assessing this aspect of their business. This
simple inquiry can offer a glimpse into the soul of your enterprise. If people don't know
why they're doing what they're doing, how can you expect them to be motivated to do it?
USE REICH'S PRONOUN TEST
F
ormer U.S. labor secretary Robert B. Reich has devised a smart, simple, (and free)
diagnostic tool for measuring the health of an organization. When he talks to employees,
he listens carefully for the pronouns they use. Do employees refer to their company as
they or as we? They suggests at least some amount of disengagement, and perhaps even
alienation. We suggests the opposite that employees feel they're part of something
significant and meaningful. If you're a boss, spend a few days listening to the people
around you, not only in formal settings like meetings, but in the hallways and at lunch as
well. Are you a we organization or a they organization? The difference matters. Everybody
wants autonomy, mastery, and purpose. The thing is, we can get it but they can't.
DESIGN FOR INTRINSIC MOTIVATION
I
nternet guru and author Clay Shirky () says that the most successful websites and
electronic forums have a certain Type I approach in their DNA. They're designed often
explicitly to tap intrinsic motivation. You can do the same with your online presence if
you listen to Shirky and:
¥ Create an environment that makes people feel good about participating.
¥ Give users autonomy.
¥ Keep the system as open as possible.
And what matters in cyberspace matters equally in physical space. Ask yourself: How does
the built environment of your workplace promote or inhibit autonomy, mastery, and purpose?
PROMOTE GOLDILOCKS FOR GROUPS
A
lmost everyone has experienced the satisfaction of a Goldilocks task the kind that's
neither too easy nor too hard, that delivers a delicious sense of flow. But sometimes it's
difficult to replicate that experience when you're working in a team. People often end up
doing the jobs they always do because they've proven they can do them well, and an
unfortunate few get saddled with the flow-free tasks nobody else wants. Here are a few
ways to bring a little Goldilocks to your group:
¥
Begin with a diverse team
.
As Harvard's Teresa Amabile advises, Set up work groups so that people will stimulate
each other and learn from each other, so that they're not homogeneous in terms of their
backgrounds and training. You want people who can really cross-fertilize each other's
ideas.
¥
Make your group a no competition zone
.
Pitting coworkers against one another in the hope that competition will spark them to
perform better rarely works and almost always undermines intrinsic motivation. If you're
going to use a c-word, go with collaboration or cooperation.
¥
Try a little task-shifting
.
If someone is bored with his current assignment, see if he can train someone else in the
skills he's already mastered. Then see if he can take on some aspect of a more experienced
team member's work.
¥
Animate with purpose, don't motivate with rewards
.
Nothing bonds a team like a shared mission. The more that people share a common
cause whether it's creating something insanely great, outperforming an outside competitor,
or even changing the world the more your group will do deeply satisfying and outstanding
work.
TURN YOUR NEXT OFF-SITE INTO A FEDEX DAY
B
ehold the company off-site, a few spirit-sapping days of forced fun and manufactured
morale featuring awkward pep talks, wretched dancing, and a few trust falls. To be fair,
some off-sites reengage employees, recharge people's batteries, and restart conversations
on big issues. But if your organization's off-sites are falling short, why not try
replacing the next one with a FedEx Day? Set aside an entire day where employees can work
on anything they choose, however they want, with whomever they'd like. Make sure they have
the tools and resources they need. And impose just one rule: People must deliver
something a new idea, a prototype of a product, a better internal process the following
day. Type I organizations know what their Type X counterparts rarely comprehend: Real
challenges are far more invigorating than controlled leisure.
The Zen of Compensation: Paying People the Type I Way
Everybody wants to be paid well. I sure do. I bet you're the same. The Type I approach
to motivation doesn't require bargain basement wages or an all-volunteer workforce, but it
does demand a new approach to pay.
Think of this new approach as the Zen of compensation: In Motivation 3.0, the best use
of money is to take the issue of money off the table.
The more prominent salary, perks, and benefits are in someone's work life, the more
they can inhibit creativity and unravel performance. As Edward Deci explained in Chapter
3, when organizations use rewards like money to motivate staff, that's when they're most
demotivating. The better strategy is to get compensation right and then get it out of
sight. Effective organizations compensate people in amounts and in ways that allow
individuals to mostly forget about compensation and instead focus on the work itself.
Here are three key techniques.
1. ENSURE INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL FAIRNESS
T
he most important aspect of any compensation package is fairness. And here, fairness comes
in two varieties internal and external. Internal fairness means paying people commensurate
with their colleagues. External fairness means paying people in line with others doing
similar work in similar organizations.
Let's look at each type of fairness. Suppose you and Fred have adjoining cubicles. And
suppose you've got pretty much equivalent responsibility and experience. If Fred makes
scads more money than you, you'll be miffed. Because of this violation of internal
fairness, your motivation will plummet. Now suppose instead that you and Fred are both
auditors with ten years' experience working in a Fortune 200 company. If you discover that
similarly experienced auditors at other Fortune 200 firms are making double your salaries,
both you and Fred will experience a largely irreversible motivation dip. The company has
violated the ethic of external fairness. (One important addendum: Paying people the Type I
way doesn't mean paying everyone the same amount. If Fred has a harder job or contributes
more to the organization than you, he deserves a richer deal. And, as it turns out,
several studies have shown that most people don't have a beef with that. Why? It's fair.)
Getting the internal and external equity right isn't itself a motivator. But it is a way
to avoid putting the issue of money back on the table and making it a
de-
motivator.
2. PAY MORE THAN AVERAGE
I
f you have provided adequate baseline rewards and established internal and external
fairness, consider borrowing a strategy first surfaced by a Nobel laureate. In the
mid-1980s, George Akerlof, who later won the Nobel Prize in economics, and his wife, Janet
Yellen, who's also an economist, discovered that some companies seemed to be overpaying
their workers. Instead of paying employees the wages that supply and demand would have
predicted, they gave their workers a little more. It wasn't because the companies were
selfless and it wasn't because they were stupid. It was because they were savvy. Paying
great people a little more than the market demands, Akerlof and Yellen found, could
attract better talent, reduce turnover, and boost productivity and morale.
Higher wages could actually
reduce
a company's costs.
The pay-more-than-average approach can offer an elegant way to bypass if-then rewards,
eliminate concerns about unfairness, and help take the issue of money off the table. It's
another way to allow people to focus on the work itself. Indeed, other economists have
shown that providing an employee a high level of base pay do